Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer networks and more particularly to dispersing error encoded data.
Description of Related Art
Computing devices are known to communicate data, process data, and/or store data. Such computing devices range from wireless smart phones, laptops, tablets, personal computers (PC), work stations, and video game devices, to data centers that support millions of web searches, stock trades, or on-line purchases every day. In general, a computing device includes a central processing unit (CPU), a memory system, user input/output interfaces, peripheral device interfaces, and an interconnecting bus structure.
As is further known, a computer may effectively extend its CPU by using “cloud computing” to perform one or more computing functions (e.g., a service, an application, an algorithm, an arithmetic logic function, etc.) on behalf of the computer. Further, for large services, applications, and/or functions, cloud computing may be performed by multiple cloud computing resources in a distributed manner to improve the response time for completion of the service, application, and/or function. For example, Hadoop is an open source software framework that supports distributed applications enabling application execution by thousands of computers.
In addition to cloud computing, a computer may use “cloud storage” as part of its memory system. As is known, cloud storage enables a user, via its computer, to store files, applications, etc. on an Internet storage system. The Internet storage system may include a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system and/or a dispersed storage system that uses an error correction scheme to encode data for storage.
Within memory storage systems, there may be instances where more than one device (e.g., such as associated with more than one user) may request data. The prior art does not provide an adequate means by which various instantiations of that data may be provided to multiple devices (e.g., such as associated with multiple users) in an effective manner. In addition, in the content of media content providers, it can be very expensive if not totally impracticable to maintain multiple separate and distinct copies of the same media that is being requested by multiple devices (e.g., such as associated with multiple users). The prior art does not provide an adequate means by which data may be provided (sometimes concurrently, in parallel, and/or simultaneously) to multiple devices (e.g., such as associated with multiple users).